In teaching, and I suppose in life, they often say that the difference you make is not always the one you intended. It's the grand reason you entered the profession or the high ideals you hold that you impart on your students, it's often an oft-handed comment that just happened to be made at the right time to the right listener. Often, you meant the most to the student you may have had the barest of a relationship with.
Today, after school, a colleague of mine had such an impact on me. Mr. Y did not join Teach for America instead he quit his job in business to work at urban education on his own. He teaches ESL and some special ed classes and I asked him today if he had any advice on what to do with the kids who are just so far behind and so emotionally disturbed that all I feel like I can do is keep them quiet through the class day.
"Is there anything else I can do?"
"I don't think there's any secret to it or anything."
"So it's just one of those things where you do the best you can?"
"I don't know, it's more than that. I feel sorry for a lot of these kids. Some of them, whose parents used drugs while they were pregnant, are missing the parts of their brains that allow them to socialize normally. I just try and think how sad it must be to go through life like that. I mean these kids need to be read their ABCs and while their parents might often like us to read Hamlet to them, we know they're not going to get it. But at the same time, doing that gives them some kind of dignity that they deserve if nothing else."
I think it was the word "dignity" that did it. I don't really know what it means but it just made me think of geriatrics on life support who deserve some semblance of a normal life. I almost started to cry I was so taken aback. These are kids who have 70 years of life ahead of them and we're already talking about giving them some small amount of dignity. And it's not just that it's fucked up, it's that it's not going to change. I don't mean in the long-term but for these kids right now, it's not going to change. This IS their life.
The other day, I was at Fordham attending a class and the discussion turned to the difficulties of teaching. Too much focus on testing. Too much paperwork. Bulletin boards take too much time. Administrators suck. I sat there listening and then I raised my hand to speak:
"You know, when we all joined TFA, I hoep that we knew that education was fucked up. That's why we entered it. Well hey, now you're here. Guess what, it's fucked up. You know that now. When I read the papers I hear the chancellor complain that the teachers are the problem, I hear the teachers complain that the chancellor is the problem. Well guess what, there's no more excuses. Despite all the bullshit, from 8:20-2:30 in your classroom it's you and your kids. You knew it was fucked up when you joined, the real question is what are we going to do about it. Do we sit here and make excuses and complain, or do we say, 'Yah, that's why I'm here, it's go-time.'"
Later today, I ran into a teacher at my school who has the twin-sister of one of my students. We had been having trouble with the sisters and he had finally been able to meet with the parent.
"How did it go?"
"Great, I'm reporting them to child services."
"What happened?"
"The mother said she couldn't be responsible for the daughters (we often see these 10-year-olds walking around The Bronx alone) because she works such long hours as a stripper in Hunt's Point, you know where all the prostitutes are?"
"Fuck."
Earlier in the day, I was upset with how one of my classes acted on Friday with a substitute. The man was middle eastern and on top of their gross misbehavior, many of them had taken to calling him Osama Bin Laden.
"What would you say if I told you I was bringing a friend to meet you guys and this friend, when he's walking by blind people on the street who are asking for change, he grabs their money and runs off. Just takes advantage of him. What would you say to that?"
Naturally, they all say that such a person is bad and that they wouldn't want me to bring him.
"Well, you all are no different. In comes this man who is trying to do the best job he can to teach you and all you do is treat him horribly. If each of you is disgusted with a person who would rob a blindman you should look in the mirror and be disgusted with yourselves. I can't believe you would take advantage of a man who is just trying to do his job like that. And, on top of that, you decide to call him Osama Bin Laden, don't you know how wrong that is?"
For the next hour, my class of fifth-graders, another teacher and myself had a discussion about race. Nearly every child in the class had an experience with racism. With expectations based around color. With problems in skin tone. One of my students who was travelling with her family in Pennsylvania said they weren't served in a restaurant. Another said he and his cousin weren't allowed into Playland under a family pass because they didn't believe that two people with such different skin tones were part of the same family. Nobody should have to deal with that kind of behavior, certainly not a 10-year-old.
Finally, toward the end, one of my students raised his hand. This student is repeating the grade and is not very good at math. He also has ADHD, a mom as old as I am in the middle of a divorce and other emotional problems.
"One time I tried to pick up my sister from school and the lady wouldn't let me get her because she said that our skin colors weren't the same so I couldn't be related to her."
"So what did you do?"
"I said, 'It doesn't matter what color her skin is, she's my sister.'"
All this stuff, as I write it, feels like some heavy shit. It's strange, I mean it's always there in the background and yet I'm spending tonight watching Sex in the City, K Street and Queer Eye for the Straight Guy. There is something completely and fundamentally fucking absurd about this whole thing. I feel more and more, everday, that it's easy to block yourself off from a lot of life. If you keep it out, things make sense. You create a world for yourself and everything goes according to plan. But if you let in the whole fucking crazy lot of it, it's confusing and scary and so absurd that it all kind of makes sense. I don't think any of this does. I don't know. It's like you either think about what happens in the Bronx or you live vicariously through Samantha but if you try to accept that both things are part of the same world there's no way to put them together. But I think that when the two parts of your life come into such contradiction a major movement or synthesis is approaching. Cognitive dissonance to this degree can't exist for very long without some kind of breakdown. Strangely I don't feel like I'm part of the vast movement of this world that's changing it constantly. Instead, like our everyday experience, we're often aware of the insanity of an entire planet turning when we look at the clouds and yet we've become so jaded that it ceases to phase us. Or maybe, every so often, a time comes when we sit back and say, "Holy shit, the fucking thing really is moving and yet I'm standing tough." Maybe I'm just hoping that this whole process that I'm going through right now will take me to one of those moments where I'll get a small second of clarity that will change everything forever.
To be a good teacher I need to be a more nurturing fellow. Stop laughing. I think more than that though, if nothing else, I'm becoming a more understanding man. With this kind of perspective though it's like looking out across a vast plain and I don't quite know where to go from here, or there.
I don't think any of this made sense. Even to me. But I guess that's where I am right now.
Something is wrong. I think there's been a terrorist attack.
The leaves on the trees are dying and falling off.
The days are getting shorter. The temperature is dropping.
The end is coming.
I don't know what's happening.
Help....help...hel....
I taught someone how to divide today.
I don't mean that my lesson to my class was on division but rather, that when I woke up this morning, one of my students did not know how to divide and now, as I prepare to go to sleep, he does.
It is a simple thing, but it is also scary. Every day for the rest of his life he will be able to divide. He will be able to divide up money and he will be able to do calculus. Everyday he will be able to use this skill that he did not have before he stayed after school with me today.
It is a small simple thing but it is also a very great gift both for the student. And the teacher.
tim.
From the NYT Magazine:
So is Jose Manuel Prieto, a Cuban living in Mexico City, whose last novel, published in translation as ''Nocturnal Butterflies of the Russian Empire,'' is certainly among the most accomplished written by a Latin American under 40. In adolescence he was sent by the Cuban government to study engineering at a university in Siberia, though he wanted to be a writer. He had devoured ''One Hundred Years of Solitude'' in Spanish, but wondered how it would translate into Russian. He reread ''One Hundred Years of Solitude'' in Russian three times.
Recalling this not long ago, he told me that you undertake such a dismantling of another work to stop being mystified by it, not so that you can imitate it but so you can avoid doing so even accidentally. In Spanish, he said, it is hard to free yourself from the spell cast by García Márquez's hyperbolic, vernacular prose. In Russian, Prieto told me, it was hard to hear that voice, and instead he found himself mesmerized by García Márquez's formal narrative mastery and by the universality of his vision, which opens you to the wonders of everyday existence, whether you are a Cuban seeing a Siberian winter for the first time and thinking that it is just like that distant afternoon when Aureliano Buendia's father took him to discover ice or an American reading about Aureliano endlessly making little gold fishes in his workroom and recalling his own late father's life spent making false teeth.